I am an ordinary everyday girl that just loves food, wines and gastronomic experiences. I want to encourage other everyday people to discover their inner foodie!

Smoking -101.4, Ribs

Ribs….the golden standard of grill masters everywhere and the word that makes the mouths of most BBQ fans water. I couldn’t wait to try them out so as our next smoking adventure I loaded up.

I purchased a package of pork ribs with memphis season already on them from Costco. The package was about $27 and had what looked like 2 large racks of ribs in it. I purchased the pre-seasoned ribs as it was already half way through the day and I thought this would speed up the process.

This time we switched over to maple wood pellets. According to the package they are good for smoking pork and beef and should impart a sweeter smoky flavour. I should also mention here that the the smoker we have comes with a convenient door at the back of the pellet hopper that opens up so you can change out the wood pellets with ease.

I picked a recipe from the Traeger site for competition ribs as it looked pretty simple. Since I had the pre-seasoned ribs, I skipped over the rib preparation and seasoning portion and moved right to the cooking. The recipe says to smoke (on the smoke setting) the ribs for 2 hours so on they went.

(again I noticed that the smoke setting seemed to be running high at 220 degrees so I called the Taeger help line through their 1-800 number to get some advice. They were very helpful and were able to walk me through the steps to lower the factory settings so that we could smoke at a lower temperature.)

After the two hours on smoke the next step was to remove them from the grill,

sprinkle with dark brown sugar, butter and honey then wrap tightly in tin foil and return to the smoker at a higher setting of 225 degrees for another 2 hours meat side down.

After a painstaking 4 hours Cook time we were almost there! I took the ribs out of their juice filled foil and put them directly on the grill to start the saucing.

They do provide many options for sauces but I just grabbed a bottle of one of our favourites from the pantry and forged ahead. The recipe suggests this final grilling takes anywhere between 20 minutes and one hour depending on how tender your ribs are when they come out of the foil. Our ribs were fairly tender so I grilled them for another half an hour basting generously in sauce before taking them off.

At this point I have to admit that it was pretty much impossible not to steal a bit of the crispy edge off for a taste but try to hold off and Leave them to rest for 15 minutes. This lets them rest the juices back into the meat and firm them up enough to cut. Finally we happily and greedily dug in!

I have to say that these were by far the best ribs I have ever had. They were tender enough that you could easily bite through them and they would pull right off the bone with a great smoky flavour. Overall they were tender and juicy, sweet and sticky the perfect rib. Even the leftovers the next day served cold were moist and delicious.